Right and/or Wrong: How Cults & Crusades Invert Morality
As an atheist, my mom enforced the Golden Rule—as Jesus taught. She told me not to lie—as God commanded. So what’s wrong with Mike Johnson?
I was not brought up with religion. I had no reason to believe in God, or gods, simply because the subject never came up. To me, religion was just a club that other families were in; I was a little jealous of it, if anything. My mom liked to tell a story about how she took me to church at five years old—and I asked the priest if he could fly.
My moral compass doesn’t come from a divine being; I was raised with the Golden Rule, which was enforced through countless versions of the following conversation:
Mom: “How would you like it if I did that to you?”
After a guilty beat, I would have to answer: “No.”
“Then say you’re sorry.”
This will be a familiar pattern to every parent who has not deliberately raised their child to be a psychopath. It’s the simplest heuristic for figuring out if something is good or bad—whether that action is moral.
This basic idea is mirrored in core teachings of Christianity—which in its best forms delivers a story about empathy and moral redemption.
Matthew 7:12 (KJV)
“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
Luke 6:31 (KJV)
“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
Then you have Mike Johnson, or rather, you have what he represents—a complete inversion of the principles he aggressively espouses.
Over the weekend, Hakeem Jeffries had his life threatened by one of the January 6th terrorists that Donald Trump pardoned, a convicted rioter who made it all the way to the Speaker’s chair where Johnson currently wields a gavel. When a reporter asked whether Trump made a mistake in offering a blanket pardon to the insurrectionists, Johnson curdled, and shot back Third Reich plagiarism about the No Kings rally:
“Let’s not make it a partisan issue. You don’t want me to go there… and the rhetoric that you saw on display on Saturday, we highlighted yesterday. It plays into this. There are people that get triggered.
There are deranged people in society when they hear elected officials participating in a rally that was paid for by Soros and sponsored by communists with signs and placards and mantras that were repeated that we should bring death to fascist politicians, what they mean is they call every Republican or fascist now. They’re calling for the death of elected officials.”
This is an inversion of Christian morality. “Love your enemies”? Not Mike Johnson. Instead, his reaction to his colleague’s life being threatened with violence was to lie about his political opponents, to project the violence being threatened against Democrats onto Democrats.
Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
As an atheist, I find most of the Commandments to be pretty sensible actually, including the one about lying.
Breaking the Golden Rule
How did Mike Johnson find himself on the wrong side of so many of Jesus’s teachings and God’s commands? How did his faith get inverted into ritual humiliation and submission to arguably the least Christian man in the world? Here is a cartoon demonstrating how I see his dilemma, as he finds out which words are supposed to come out of his mouth that day.
I want to discuss five statements that I think represent the degradation of empathy over time, which help explain not just Mike Johnson, but our civilizational moral crisis more generally.
“Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”
—secular Golden Rule
“This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, c. 1883-1888
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
—Aleister Crowley, slogan of the Ordo Templis Orientis (1904)
“God wills it.”
—translated from “Deus Vult,” chant of the First Crusades (1095)
“TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING”
—Hat worn by Trump and other government officials (2025)
The sequence of this chain is: Self-as-others → Self-as-will → Will-as-law → God-as-will → Leader-as-God.
Each link represents a different phase of moral capture in which the principle that defined morality in one stage is inverted in the next. This is not a historical or causal chain but a model of metaphysical capture—a pattern that is repeated at micro and macro scales, in whole and in part, to transfer moral authority from the many to the few—and finally to the one.
Self-as-Others—The Golden Rule
However you say it, the act of following the golden rule—“treat people as you would like to be treated”—is commonly called empathy. In order to follow this rule, by definition you have to imagine yourself in someone else’s position to make a moral determination. That is the essence of empathy and the meaning of civilization; it creates the bonds and the binds between people that allow us to live together.
“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
The downside of empathy and civilization, is that you can’t do anything you want. It is the difference, as Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu put it, between freedom and liberty.
“Liberty is the right of doing whatever the laws permit.”
Montesquieu was, like the other Enlightenment thinkers and American revolutionaries, describing a society that is ruled by a kind of group empathy, where the democratic process decides the minimum care we must show to others (ie. not murder or steal from them)—and what freedoms to restrain in order to provide it (ie. murder and theft are illegal).
Self-as-Will—And Nothing Besides!
Nietzsche wrote in his notebooks sometime in the mid-1880s:
“This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
Nietzsche’s concept of will to power has been abused and misunderstood since he declared “God is dead,” but it represents a core truth that cannot be disputed. People don’t like rules, at least the ones that apply to them. As an avid anti-authoritarian myself, Nietzsche’s Übermensch—an idealized, unshackled creative force—appeals to me. But it is also deeply naïve; if you try to run a society that way, things will go haywire immediately.
His transgressive ideas, while not rooted in cruelty or nihilism, have been syncretically mixed with malignant ideologies by countless false prophets, grifters, and dictators as a way to seize the creative power of the individual will and transmute it to something that serves their purposes.
Will-as-Law—Crowley’s Magick Trick
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
— Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis, 1904
British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) founded the quasi-religious movement Thelema, which centered the concept of True Will—essentially a mystical reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s will to power but with an added layer of occultism and ritual magick. According to The Book of the Law True Will was not meant as unchecked personal indulgence but as a mandate to align one’s actions with a higher, cosmic purpose: to fulfill spiritual destiny by harmonizing with the universe’s hidden order.
By inserting the supernatural into Nietzsche’s secular will, Crowley made a Holy Guardian Angel the legal guardian of your will to power, and a co-dependent partner in your self-deification.
His biblical formulation was deliberate: “Do what thou wilt” replaces Nietzsche’s self-determination with self-worship, cloaked in the authority of sacred law. Crowley formalized this neo-pagan cosmology as the leader of the secret society Ordo Templis Orientis (O.T.O.), where ancient rites and sexual mysticism were reanimated to serve modern appetites.
Thelema and O.T.O. have spawned a cultic zoo of descendants: Charles Manson’s circle via Bobby Beausoleil; Scientology’s structure and ritual psychology through L. Ron Hubbard; and helped seed the technocratic nihilism of Silicon Valley through O.T.O. disciple Jack Parsons—who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The pagan magick of Crowley became a laboratory for using myth to deify the self—a system that promised transcendence through will alone.
But when will is replaced by God, the self it seeks to glorify is obliterated.
God-as-Will—“Deus Vult”
In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II exhorted Christians to liberate Jerusalem. The crowd erupted in chants of “Deus vult! Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”). The First Crusade began the following year.
This is perhaps the most consequential use of the replacement of will with God in the history of the world. It launched a violent and centuries-long Christian war on its fellow Abrahamic religions whose reverberations can be seen tattooed onto the bicep of the “War Secretary.” All of it is based on the replacement of personal morality with a vengeful, angry God.
In 1144, a young Christian boy in England, William of Norwich, was murdered; his death became the first known example of blood-libel accusing Jews of ritual murder. This lie was the start of a nearly millennium-long crusade that may have been dropped as official doctrine of the Church, but has cost countless millions of lives, and continues to this day.
Blood libel became a secular weapon in the 18th and 19th century, used as a convenient scapegoat for societal ills, until the turn of the 20th century when it became the core myth that led to serial genocide. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is blood libel in the form of a hoax created by the Tsar’s Russian intelligence—the Okhrana—a document which purports to uncover a global council of Jews that secretly controls finance, media, and wants to destroy Christian civilization.
The Protocols were used as the “proof” to justify pogroms of Jews in Russia for decades—including one that ejected my grandparents. The Russian White Army spread the Protocols to America through Henry Ford, who was praised for it by Hitler in Mein Kampf. The central myth of a conspiracy of Jews who wanted to take over Germany is the Big Lie that led to the Holocaust.
When Mike Johnson said No Kings was a rally “paid for by Soros and sponsored by communists,” he was continuing a long painful lesson on what happens when you replace will with God.
Leader-as-God—“MUSSOLINI HA SEMPRE RAGIONE”
While Italian fascist Benito Mussolini was hardly the first authoritarian dictator, he was an innovator of sorts. His fusion of self-deification and fascist ideology was an inspiration to Hitler, who ultimately made Mussolini a victim of his own idea of fusing the state and economy into a personalist, totalist dictatorship.
Mussolini’s slogan “the leader is always right” is the essence of this fusion, the replacement of the typical final decision-maker for Europeans in the early 20th century, the Christian God, with himself. This is the final transgression that renders all cults and crusades more than just propaganda, a leader who puts himself at the top of humanity’s ontology—the divine, unquestioned voice of “truth.”
When a society or a group allows this transmutation, atrocities follow, because at this stage morality has been successfully inverted from the Golden Rule to the Golden Ruler. It is no longer your connection to others that defines morality; it is your submission to the will of the leader.
The names who appear on this path are a who’s who of deadly cult leaders and despots: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Jim Jones, bin Laden—and now Donald Trump.
Mike Johnson, Ideological Alchemist
Mike Johnson has raised the stakes in the American drama time and time again, by: refusing to fulfill the function of his Article II role as a check on federal power; pushing through disastrous policies that hurt his own constituents; deliberately weaponizing his statutory power against political enemies; and as an increasingly aggressive mouthpiece for the worst lies of the Trump regime.
Johnson’s rationale for his un-Christ-like behavior, which is shared by many in the Republican Party and Trump’s Cabinet, is no different than the Crusades: “Deus vult!” But the vessel through which “God wills it” is Donald Trump.
How does Mike Johnson rationalize this? How does he psychologically split the act of breaking the Ninth Commandment hundreds of times a day in the name of a philandering, godless criminal from his Christianity? The short answer is ideological alchemy: “spiritual war”.
Johnson has repeatedly said he is engaged in a holy war, and he sees his role as a “Christian soldier”:
“There is a time… to fight for the truth, you have to fight for your families… There’s nothing on Earth that is a greater threat to the principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness of this world than a bunch of well-equipped, well-prepared, highly motivated Christian soldiers…”
“We’re in a spiritual battle for the future of the country. There’s no other way to say it. There are a lot of arrows flying around right now. We have some serious problems in this country, and there’s no way to candy coat that or put gloss on it. It just is. The only good news is, from my perspective is, I think all of that is going to change soon.”
So, in this frame of reference, if someone says “Trump lies constantly” Mike Johnson can think, or even say: “God uses imperfect vessels.”
Other examples of this alchemy:
“Jesus taught humility” → “We must fight fire with fire.”
“Trump targets the weak” → “They deserve to be judged.”
“Trump breaks the law” → “We obey a higher law.”
This is the final inversion of the Golden Rule. It is not about others. It is not about the self. It is not about will. It is not about God. It is about the annihilation of belief, the abdication of the self; it is human weakness masquerading as divine will.
The Biggest Lie
Perhaps the biggest and most deadly lie in human civilization is that empathy means weakness. This false premise is the foundational weapon of those who seek to unburden themselves of the rules that bind society together—because it is empathy that creates the space for the individual to thrive and for society to exist at all. The Golden Rule is Jesus’s Algorithm for good reasons.
It’s hard to argue there is a single movement that represents the opposite of the Golden Rule more than National Socialism—an ideology designed as absolute repudiation of the notion that the experience of others is an important part of the moral calculus. As Captain G.M. Gilbert famously said of the Nazis:
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
— Gustave Mark Gilbert (G. M. Gilbert), Army psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials
He was talking about people like Mike Johnson, almost entirely Christian, who had been taught some version of the Gospels but traded their empathy for submission, and inverted their faith to stay in power.
The moral of this story is that the Golden Rule works. If you don’t want to believe my mom, believe the Bible.
Zechariah 7:9–10
“Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother:
And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor.”Micah 6:8
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
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I was indoctrinated in White Christian Nationalism as a child and teenager. Suspension of disbelief is a key part of that process. It hones them into the best Christian soldiers. Many have been brainwashed to die for this. (I started hearing I might have to kill people for Jesus in elementary school.) You get how powerful this indoctrination is, Jim, and what it can lead people to do. Millions of Americans still don’t get it.
The fundamentalists and end-timers have been praying for Armageddon for decades now. They can hardly wait and think it will be a good thing overall. So I have always felt they will do anything to "help God" bring it on. Mike Johnson believes this, as do other Dominionists like Ted Cruz. Like Jim, I too was raised by atheists. However, I had to rebel and study religion for decades. Went to every church I could for years. What is funny to me, is that the Bible claims Satan is in charge of this world. That was actually something I could believe. I could not believe most of the rest of it, so remained an atheist. Several Bible verses support the idea of Satan's influence over the world:
In John 12:31, Jesus speaks of the "ruler of this world" being cast out, signifying Satan's spiritual defeat through his death and resurrection.
2 Corinthians 4:4 calls Satan the "god of this world," who blinds unbelievers to the gospel.
1 John 5:19 states that "the whole world lies in the power of the evil one," contrasting believers with the rest of the world under Satan's control.
Ephesians 2:2 describes Satan as the "prince of the power of the air," influencing those who are disobedient.
In Luke 4:6, during Jesus' temptation, Satan claims authority over the kingdoms of the world, a claim Jesus doesn't deny, suggesting Satan's temporary earthly power.